by Ngaio Marsh
“Come on,” Nicola said firmly.
When they had shut the door behind them, Andrew took her hands in his, thanked her for his entertainment and kissed her lightly on the cheek.
“Here we go,” he said.
They collected the canvases from the car and walked to the Alleyns’ house, which was at the end of a blind street near Montpelier Square. It was such a natural and familiar thing for Nicola to take this evening walk that her anxieties left her, and by the time they reached their destination and Troy herself opened the door to them, she felt nothing but pleasure in their expedition.
Troy was wearing the black trousers and smock that meant she had been working. Her shortish dark hair capped a spare head and fell in a single lock across her forehead. Andrew stood to attention and carried his canvases as if they were something rather disgraceful that had been found in the guardroom.
“I’m in the studio,” Troy said. “Shall we go there? It’s a better light.”
Andrew himself fell in and followed them.
There was a large charcoal drawing on the easel in Troy’s studio: a woman with a cat. On the table where Troy had been working were other drawings under a strong lamp.
Andrew said: “Mrs. Alleyn, it’s terribly kind of you to let me come.”
“Why?” Troy said, cheerfully. “You’re going to show me some work, aren’t you?”
“Oh God!” Andrew said. “So Nicola tells me.”
Troy looked at him in a friendly manner and began to talk about the subject of the drawing, saying how paintable and silly she was, always changing her hair and coming in the wrong clothes, and that the drawing was a study for a full-scale portrait. Andrew eased up a little.
Nicola said: “There are one or two things to explain.”
“Not as many as you may think. Rory rang up an hour ago from Little Codling.”
“Did he tell you about Andrew’s stepfather?”
“Yes, he did. I expect,” Troy said to Andrew, “it seems unreal as well as dreadful, doesn’t it?”
“In a way it does. We — I didn’t see much of him. I mean—”
“Andrew,” Nicola said, “insists that the Cid has got him down among the suspects.”
“Well, it’s not for me to say,” Troy replied, “but I didn’t think it sounded like that. Let’s have a look at your things.”
She took her drawing off the easel and put it against the wall. Andrew dropped all his paintings on the floor with a sudden crash. “I’m frightfully sorry,” he said.
“Come on,” Troy said. “I’m not a dentist. Put it on the easel.”
The first painting was a still life: tulips on a window sill in a red goblet with rooftops beyond them.
“Hul-lo!” Troy said and sat down in front of it.
Nicola wished she knew a great deal more about painting. She could see it was incisive, freely done and lively, with a feeling for light and colour. She realized that she would have liked it very much if she had come across it somewhere else. It didn’t look at all amateurish.
“Yes, well of course,” Troy said, and it was clear that she meant: “Of course you’re a painter and you were right to show me this.” She went on talking to Andrew, asking him about his palette and the conditions under which he worked. Then she saw his next canvas, which was a portrait. Désirée’s flaming hair and cadaverous eyes leapt out of a flowery background. She had sat in a glare of sunlight and the treatment was far from being conventional.
“My mum,” Andrew said.
“You had fun with the colour, didn’t you? Don’t you find the eye-round-the-corner hell to manage in a three-quarter head? This one hasn’t quite come off, has it? Look, it’s that dab of pink that hits up. Now, let’s see the next one.”
The next and last one was a male torso uncompromisingly set against a white wall. It had been painted with exhaustive attention to anatomy. “Heavens!” Troy ejaculated. “You’ve practically skinned the man.” She looked at it for some time and then said: “Well, what are you going to do about this? Would you like to work here once a week?”
After that Andrew was able to talk to her and did so with such evident delight that Nicola actually detected in herself a twinge of something that astonished her and gave an edge to her extreme happiness.
It was not until much later, when Troy had produced lager, and they were telling her about the Grantham Gallery project, that Nicola remembered Mr. Period.
“I think,” she told Troy, “you’re going to be approached by my new boss. He’s writing a book on etiquette and his publishers want a drawing of him. He’s rather shy about asking because you turned down one of his lordly chums. You know him, don’t you? Mr. Pyke Period?”
“Yes, of course I do. He crops up at all the Private Views that he thinks are smart occasions. I’ll be blowed if I’ll draw him.”
“I was afraid that might be your reaction.”
“Well,” Troy said, “there’s no denying he really is a complete old phony. Do you know he once commissioned a pupil of mine to do a painting from some print he’d picked up, of a Georgian guardee making faces at a thunderstorm. He said it was one of his ancestors, and so it may have been, but after a lot of beating about the bush he made it quite clear that he wanted this job faked to look like an eighteenth-century portrait. My pupil was practically on the breadline at the time and I’m afraid the thing was done.”
“Oh, dear!” Nicola sighed. “I know. It’s there, in the library, I think. He’s like that, but he’s rather an old sweetie-pie, all the same. Isn’t he, Andrew?”
“Nicola,” said Andrew, “I daresay he is. But he’s a terrible old donkey. And yet — I don’t know. Is P.P. just plain silly? I doubt it. I rather think there’s an element of low cunning.”
“Childish, not low,” Nicola insisted, but Andrew was looking at her with such a degree of affectionate attention that she was extremely flustered.
“Well,” Andrew said. “Never mind, anyway, about P.P.”
“I can’t help it. He was so miserable all the afternoon. You know: trying to forge ahead with his tips on U-necessities, as he inevitably calls them, and then falling into wretched little trances. He really was in a bad state. Everything seemed to upset him.”
“What sorts of things?” Troy asked. “Have some more lager?”
“No, thank you. Well, he kept singing in an extremely dismal manner. And then he would stop and turn sheet-white. He muttered something about ‘No, no, I mustn’t — better forget it,’ and looked absolutely terrified.”
“How very odd,” Andrew said. “What was his song?”
“I don’t remember — yes, I do!” Nicola exclaimed. “Of course I do! Because he’d done the same sort of thing yesterday, after lunch: hummed it and then been cross with himself. But it was different today. He seemed quite shattered.”
“And the song?”
“It was the pop-song that ghastly Leonard kept whistling through his teeth at luncheon. He even sang a bit of it when they were looking at the cigarette case: If you mean what I think you mean, O.K. by me. Things aren’t always what they seem. O.K. by me.”
“Not exactly a ‘Period piece.’ ”
“It was all very rum.”
“Did you happen to mention it to Rory?” Troy asked.
“No. I haven’t seen him since it happened. And anyway, why should I?”
“No reason at all, I daresay.”
“Look,” Nicola said quickly, “however foolish he may be, Mr. Period is quite incapable of the smallest degree of hanky-panky—” She stopped short and the now familiar jolt of indefinable panic revisited her. “Serious hanky-panky, I mean,” she amended.
“Good Lord, no!” Andrew said. “Of course he is. Incapable, I mean.”
Nicola stood up. “It’s a quarter to twelve,” she said. “We must go, Andrew. Poor Troy!”
The telephone rang and Troy answered it. The voice at the other end said quite distinctly: “Darling?”
“Hullo,” Troy
said. “Still at it?”
“Very much so. Is Nicola with you?”
“Yes,” Troy said. “She and Andrew Bantling.”
“Could I have a word with her?”
“Here you are.”
Troy held out the receiver and Nicola took it feeling her heart thud stupidly against her ribs.
“Hullo, Cid,” she said.
“Hullo, Nicola. There’s something that’s cropped up here that you might just possibly be able to give me a line about. After I left you today, did you discuss our conversation with anybody?”
“Well, yes,” she said. “With Andrew.”
“Anyone else? Now don’t go jumping to conclusions, there’s a good child, but did Mr. Period want to know if you told me anything about his luncheon party?”
Nicola swallowed. “Yes, he did. But it was only, poor lamb, because he hates the idea of your hearing about the digs Mr. Cartell made at his snob-values. He was terribly keen to know if I’d told you anything about the baptismal register story.”
“And you said you had told me?”
“Well, I had to, when he asked me point-blank. I made as little of it as I could.”
“Yes. I see. One other thing — and it’s important, Nicola. Do you, by any chance, know anything that would connect Mr. Period with a popular song?”
“A song! No — not—”
“Something about O.K. by me?”
CHAPTER SEVEN
Pixie
It had been five past eleven when Alleyn was summoned to the telephone. He and Fox, having struck a blank in respect to the gloves, had been mulling over their notes in the Codling pub when the landlord, avid with curiosity, summoned him.
“It’s a call for you, sir,” he said. “Local. I didn’t catch the name. There’s no one in the bar parlour, if that suits you.”
Alleyn took the call in the bar parlour.
He said: “Alleyn here. Hullo?”
Mr. Pyke Period, unmistakable and agitated, answered. “Alleyn? Thank God! I’m so sorry to disturb you at this unconscionable hour. Do forgive me. The thing is there’s something I feel I ought to tell—”
The voice stopped. Alleyn heard a bump, followed by a soft, heavier noise and then by silence. He waited for a moment or two. There was a faint definite click and, again, silence. He rang and got the “engaged” signal. He hung up and turned to find Fox at his side.
“Come on,” he said. “I’ll tell you on the way.”
When they were clear of the pub he broke into a run, with Fox, heavy and capable, on his heels.
“Period,” Alleyn said. “And it looks damn’ fishy. Stopped dead in full cry. Characteristic noises.”
The pub was in a side street that led into the Green at Mr. Period’s end of it. There was nobody about and their footsteps sounded loud on the paving-stones. Connie Cartell’s Pekingese was yapping somewhere on the far side of the Green. Distantly, from the parish schoolroom, came the sound of communal singing.
Only one room in Mr. Period’s house was lit and that was the library. Stepping as quietly as the gravelled drive would permit, they moved towards the French windows. Bay trees stood on either side of the glass doors, which were almost but not quite shut.
Alleyn looked across the table Nicola had used, past her shrouded typewriter and stacked papers. Beyond, to his right, and against the window in the side wall, was Mr. Period’s desk. His shaded lamp, as if it had been switched on by a stage manager, cast down a pool of light on that restricted area, giving it an immense theatricality. The telephone receiver dangled from the desk and Mr. Period’s right arm hung beside it. His body was tipped forward in his chair and his face lay among his papers. The hair was ruffled like a baby’s and from his temple a ribbon of blood had run down the cheekbone to the nostril.
“Doctor”—Alleyn said—“What’s-his-name — Elkington.”
Fox said: “Better use the other phone.” He replaced the receiver very gingerly and went into the hall.
Mr. Period was not dead. When Alleyn bent over him, he could hear his breathing — a faint snoring sound. The pulse was barely perceptible.
Fox came back. “On his way,” he said. “Will I search outside?”
“Right. We’d better not move him. I’ll do the house.”
It was perfectly quiet and empty of living persons. Alleyn went from room to room, opening and shutting doors, receiving the indefinable smells of long-inhabited places, listening, looking and finding nothing. Mrs. Mitchell’s room smelt stuffily of hairpins and Alfred Belt’s of boot polish. Mr. Period’s bedroom smelt of hair lotion and floor polish, and Mr. Cartell’s of blankets and soap. Nothing was out of place anywhere in Mr. Period’s house. Alleyn returned to the library as Fox came in.
“Nothing,” Fox said. “Nobody, anywhere.”
“There’s the instrument,” Alleyn said.
It was the bronze paperweight in the form of a fish that Désirée had given Mr. Period. It lay on the carpet close to his dangling hand.
“I’ll get our chaps,” Fox said. “They’re in the pub. Here’s the doctor.”
Dr. Elkington came in looking as if his professional manner had been fully extended.
“What now, for God’s sake?” he said and went straight to his patient. Alleyn watched him make his examination, which did not take long.
“All right,” he said. “On the face of it he’s severely concussed. I don’t think there’s any extensive cranial injury but we’ll have to wait. Half an inch either way and it’d have been a different matter. We’d better get him out of this. Where’s that man of his — Alfred?”
“At a Church Social,” said Alleyn. “We could get a mattress. Or what about the sofa in the drawing-room?”
“All right. Better than manhandling him all over the shop.”
Fox and Alleyn carried Mr. Period into the drawing-room and propped him up on the sofa, Dr. Elkington supporting his head.
“Will he speak?” Alleyn asked Dr. Elkington.
“Might or might not. Your guess is as good as mine. There’s nothing we can do at the moment. He may have to go to hospital. I’d better get a nurse. What’s the story, if there is a story?”
“Somebody chucked a bronze paperweight at him. You’d better look at it. Don’t touch it unless you have to. Fox will show you. I’m staying here. I’ll let you know if there’s a change.”
“Attempted murder?” Dr. Elkington said, making a mouthful of it.
“I think so.”
“For God’s sake!” Dr. Elkington repeated. He and Fox went out of the room. Alleyn drew up a chair and watched Mr. Period.
His eyes were not quite closed and his breathing, though still markedly stertorous, seemed to be more regular. Alleyn heard Dr. Elkington at the telephone.
The doorbell rang. The other chaps, he thought. Fox would cope.
Mr. Period’s eyes opened and looked, squintingly, at nothing.
“You’re all right,” Alleyn said, leaning towards him.
Dr. Elkington came back. “It’s the paperweight sure enough,” he said. “Trace of blood on the edge.” He went to the sofa and took Mr. Period’s hand in his.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “You’re all right.”
The flaccid lips parted. After an indeterminate noise a whisper drifted through them: “It was that song.”
“Song? What song?”
“He’s deeply concussed, Alleyn.”
“What song?”
“Should have told Alleyn. Whistling. Such awfully bad form. Luncheon.”
“What song?”
“Couldn’t — out of my head.” Mr. Period whispered plaintively. “So silly. ‘O.K. by me.’ So, of course. Recognized. At once.” The sound faded and for a moment or two the lips remained parted. Then Mr. Period’s own voice, uncannily articulate, said quite clearly: “May I speak to Superintendent Alleyn?”
“Yes,” Alleyn said, holding up a warning hand. “Alleyn speaking.”
“Just to tell you. Whistli
ng. Recognized it. Last night. In the lane. Very wrong of me not to — Divided loyalties.” There was a longish silence. Alleyn and Elkington stared absently at each other. “O.K. by me,” the voice sighed. “So vulgar.”
The eyes closed again.
“This may go on for hours, Alleyn.”
“How much will he remember when he comes round?”
“Everything probably, up to the moment he was knocked out. Unless there’s a serious injury to the brain.” Dr. Elkington was stooping over his patient. “Still bleeding a bit. I’ll have to put in a couple of stitches. Where’s my bag?” He went out. Fox was talking to the men in the hall. “We’ll seal the library and cover the area outside the window.”
“Do we search?” asked somebody. Williams, Alleyn decided.
“Better talk to the Chief.”
Fox and Williams came in with Dr. Elkington, who opened his professional bag.
“Just steady his head, will you?” he asked Alleyn.
Holding Mr. Period’s head between his hands, Alleyn said to Fox and Williams: “It looks as if the thing was thrown at him by somebody standing between the table and the French windows while he was ringing me up. I heard the receiver knock against the desk as it fell and I heard a click that might well have been made by the windows being pulled to. You’re not likely to find anything on the drive. It’s as dry as a bone and in any case the French doors are probably used continually. Whoever made the attack had time enough to effect a clean getaway before we came trundling in, but I think the best line we can take is to keep watch in case he’s still hiding in the garden — Noakes and Thompson can do that — and Fox, you rouse up Miss Cartell’s household. Somebody will have to stay here in case he speaks again. Bob, would you do that?”
“Right,” said Superintendent Williams.
“I’ve got a call to London.”
“To London?” Williams repeated.
“It may give us a line. Fox, I’ll join you at Miss Cartell’s. O.K?”
“O.K., Mr. Alleyn.”
“And Bailey had better have a go at the paperweight. I think it was probably on the table near the French windows. There are various piles of stacked papers, all but one weighed down. And one of the ashtrays has got two lipsticked butts in it. Miss Ralston and Leiss smoke Mainsails, Lady Bantling smokes Cafards and Mr. Period, Turkish. Ask him to look. Gloves!” Alleyn ejaculated. “If we could find those damn’ gloves. Not that they are likely to have anything to do with this party, but we’ve a glove-conscious homicide on our hands, I fancy. All right.…Let’s get cracking.”